Cultivating Changemakers:
YMCA x Design For America National Project

A summer rotational program and online certification course that empowers the YMCA's youth members to become changemakers in their communities.

Client: YMCA of the USA & Design For America
Role: National Project Lead
Year: January - May 2020
Team: Riya Butani, Grace Leake, Ivana Jelenszky, Quynh Hoang
Mentors: Gray Garmon, Director, Center for Integrated Design
Deliverables: Service Concept, Product Concept, User Research, Low-Fidelity Prototypes

Changemaking with the YMCA

With the rise of boutique after-school programs and new mediums battling for the attention of young people, the YMCA has seen a significant drop in their engagement with people ages 14-18. Given the Y's history as being the largest youth-based organization and the tumultuous political/cultural climate, the YMCA was seeking to become the platform that helped young people become the changemakers that their communities needed. Our studio, Design For America at UT Austin, was given a design challenge to help the YMCA attract and enable the next generation of changemakers.

“How can we engage and empower young people to be changemakers in their communities?”

Where do we begin...?

Given the broad challenge statement, our goal was to immerse ourselves in the changemaking and YMCA space as much as possible and reframe once we'd seen a broad view of our problem. We had questions like, "What kind of resources were out there?", "What did young people at the YMCA have access to?". To answer these questions we looked at other organizations that specialized in change making, scholarly articles, and similar Y hosted programs, like [Youth & Government](https://ymcatexasyg.org/) (Y&G).

Research Questions

Is there a universal definition for changemaking that we can make use of?
What does the world of changemaking look like for young people?
What do young people need to start changemaking?
How does the Y currently fit into the lives of its young members?

After crafting our research objectives, we needed to talk to some of our stakeholders which included YMCA administration, and members. We reached out to the director of community programs at the YMCA Barton Creek branch. Her work primarily focused on the YMCA's Youth & Government program and smaller community initiatives. She gave us an interview and access to her students in the Youth & Government program. She would go on to be our main point of contact for interviewing YMCA members and staff at the YMCA Barton Creek.

“We want to push them to create impact in their communities ... What is it that you are truly passionate about? How can you take your passion and make an impact in your school or neighborhood?”

Secondary Research Insights

Changemakers, as defined by Laurie Thompson, are people who go against the status quo with radically new and different ideas and bring those ideas to life.
Many young people don't know what they are capable of and need affirmation to become changemakers.
There are various way in which young people can get involved in their communities: project management, volunteering, fundraising, and advocacy.

Meet Me at the Capital

The YMCA's Youth & Government (Y&G) program was hosting a state conference at the state capital in Austin, Texas. How convenient. Through the generosity of the staff and director of community programs, we were able to arrange some time to speak to Y&G members in between their scheduled events. Because the program had members from across the state, we thought it would be best to interview members at the convention to get a wide-range of stakeholder interviews. In total, I interviewed 8 people at the event. 7 members of Youth and Government and 1 board member of the program.

After conducting our interviews, my team needed to sift through the heap of qualitative data that we had gathered. We started to see patterns emerge when it came to the kinds of barriers that young people encountered on their changemaking journey. We found that a lot of the students came across administrative barriers within the program when it came to improving their Y&G programs at home. We also found that though the students were happy with the education and skills they were receiving through Y&G, there were ways in which the program lacked a connection with the real world when it came to creating real change. The students would research the bill writing process during the semester, draft a bill, and propose it at the state conference. Some of the students that had done well in Y&G were able to take the bills they had worked on and take them up to their representatives but these instances were very few. We would try to remedy “isolated changemaking” in our solutions.

Reframing the Problem

After combining our findings from our interviews and secondary research, we were able to bring out a few key insights that would help inform our ideation. In this phase of our research, we would reach out to more young members of the YMCA and supplement our secondary research.

Key Insights from Reframing

There are many barriers that disempower youth; financial, administrative, and perceptual.
There is a lack of easily accessible changemaker education and resources.
Providing a community that validates changemaking is essential.

The Aspirational Changemaker

We created a user persona and journey map so that our team could have a better sense of who we were designing for and what their pain points were. The above figures are the first iterations of our persona materials used in our project check-in with DFA mentors and peers. These first persona materials are focused on aspects of the Youth & Government program that were barriers for our Y&G interviewees.

As the project progressed we would eventually diverge from solely focusing on the Y&G program. We'd incorporate our findings from the shortcomings of the program with our secondary research to ideate potential solutions. We would refer to what we learned from Y&G as a case study to reference.

Collaboration in the Time of COVID-19

After we had reframed our original problem statement, my team was itching to ideate, but in March 2020, Austin, Texas was hit with its first cases of COVID-19. The university had closed its doors a day earlier than it had planned to for spring break. My team would never return to campus. Our meetings, workshops, and next steps needed to be reinvented. There were no precedents within our DFA studio for continued work during a pandemic. The challenge was definitely daunting but it was not something we were about to succumb to.

I took some time and reached out to my mentors, previous design instructors, and peers to talk about how they were approaching work during the pandemic. I took all of the feedback and insights I received from them and started to plan. I looked deeply into online collaborative software such as Miro and Loom and ways to make our communication more streamlined. With my team now spread across three time zones, we adopted a mix of Zoom invites, Loom video updates, a WhatsApp group chat, and long Slack threads as measures to keep everyone on the same page. I would eventually take what I learned from this experience and share it with the other project managers and members in my DFA studio.

Ideation

Before we had our first ideation meetings from home, my team had created some design criteria, measurements of success, and how can we's to guide our incoming ideation session beforehand. When we were developing our design criteria, we decided that we wanted to focus on community engagement, education, and empowerment as key values for our solutions.

We came up with about 40 ideas in a brainstorming session and reduced the number of ideas to 25 by combining similar or synergistic ideas. Then, we held a feasibility session in which we placed ideas on an axis with impact and feasibility being the labels and voted on the ideas we thought would be the best solution.

We decided to pursue 2 potential prototypes. One was a rotational changemaking summer program and the other was an online changemaking certification course similar to those seen on Khan Academy, Linkedin Learning, or Coursera. The rotational changemaking summer program would emulate a rotational internship program in which students would get to try different aspects of changemaking such as, volunteering, fundraising, and advocacy.

Program Curriculum Pillars

The base of these concepts would be composed of three pillars: learning, action, and empathy. We developed these based off of the insights we had gained from our secondary research in developing changemakers. We wanted these programs to be engaging and fulfilling for the students that participated in these programs. With these solutions, the Y would be providing the kids with access to resources to identify their passions, build a network, and learn key problem-solving skills through these solutions.

Learning

Help students realize their potential by giving them resources to identify what they are passionate about.
The students will participate in activities in and out of the classroom, learn by doing.

Action

Students will participate in group activities to build a community that validates their efforts.
Practice developing their communication skills.

Empathy

Use human-centered design principles to teach empathy and problem solving skills.
Exposing young people to issues in their community or those that may not affect them.

Since we now had the core features of our service and curriculum aspects defined, our next steps were to start building prototypes to test these assumptions.

Roleplaying a Summer Rotational Program

Our team decided to try conducting a roleplay to test out our summer rotational program concept. Usually, these roleplays would be done in person but, given the global situation at the time, we needed to make something that worked in Zoom.

My team created a slides presentation with imagery that simulated a summer program. We would use the initial iteration of our prototype, the journey map, as a framework for our roleplay. The user would "arrive" to the campus and be shown a picture of a parking lot. The user would show up to the program orientation and be shown an image of someone standing in the front of a lecture hall, etc. The slides were carefully crafted to simulate what an abridged version of the program would like in a day. The user would participate in group activities, conversate with our program attendees, and reflect on the activities they completed. The roleplay would then be followed by prototype research questions.

In order to facilitate this prototype testing well, we needed to be very organized and plan for everything and anything. I decided to write a script for the roleplay. Luckily, the skills I had gained in a one-off scriptwriting course I had taken sophomore year of college would come in handy for this roleplay.

I was the facilitator, making sure things were timely, narrating, and facilitating group activities. My teammates acted as Y members attending the program. They engaged in conversation, participated in the group activities, and took notes in-between their parts.

Online Certification Program

We would create a low fidelity wireframe prototype for our second prototype, the online certification program. Our pages were modeled after other online learning platforms such as LinkedIn Learning, Khan Academy, and Coursera.

With these prototype tests, we were trying to understand our user's thoughts on the program itself as opposed to testing its usability. We would ask questions like: "How do you feel about the content in this course?", "Would a course like this be empowering to you?", "What do you like about the program?", "What did you think didn't work about this prototype?". The users were very receptive to the courses. Our main findings would mainly focus on engagement and providing incentives for users to finish the program.

The DFA x YMCA National Expo

The moments leading up to the final presentation were stressful but super productive. All the Zoom calls, workshopping sessions, qualitative data, and prototype work had to be summed up into a 10-minute video presentation (which you can see below), a one-pager, and a poster. We had reserved the last week and a half of our project to work on polishing the final deliverables. We worked on a narrative that incorporated a revised persona into the final presentation and laid out our project summaries and models into the one-pager and poster.

The expo was originally supposed to be held at the YMCA of America Headquarters in Chicago but due to the pandemic was reimagined virtually. Instead of having a booth and in-person presentation, we would use a large MURAL board containing our final deliverables and user profiles. We even had a section for the stakeholders to give feedback. Those in attendance were our peers and mentors from other DFA studios, our campus mentors, and YMCA executives and representatives.

We had included a roleplay as an allusion to our prototype in our presentation. One person on the team would act as Susie, our protagonist/persona, and another would be a YMCA representative providing information on the various programs that the Y facilitates. This narrative device worked because it gave us an opportunity to lay out the dimensions of our concepts while also thinking ahead to the question's our peers could ask during our critique. We would frame potential questions our peers would ask as if Susie were asking them and incorporate them in the presentation.

Fortunately, our presentation was well received and aspects of our concepts are currently being used to develop a program for young members of the YMCA.

Post-Mortem

If I could go back in time and change anything it would be to tell myself to TALK TO MY MENTORS SOONER and delegate more tasks. I made these realizations later than I would have liked. Most of the issues I had faced at the beginning of the project had already been encountered by someone with way more experience than me and I could've avoided being overwhelmed if I had let go of the reins earlier and was more trusting of my team in the beginning of this project.

This project has been the culmination of my experiences in my design classes and projects. I could not have done this without the selflessness and wisdom of my DFA National, campus mentors, and design instructors.

Cultivating Changemakers:YMCA x Design For America National Project